would not be mediocre. It occurred to him that wit was probably superior to bull-like strength or mouse-like stealth anyway, so that was the route he chose.
His fame was modest at first in the mountains and forests along the outer edges of civilization. Other thieves admired his cleverness. As one of them put it one evening in a thieves’ tavern in the Land of Hule, ‘I’ll swear, that Althalus boy could persuade the bees to bring him honey or the birds to lay their eggs on his plate at breakfast time. Mark my words, brothers, that boy will go far.’
In point of fact, Althalus did go far. He was not by nature a sedentary man, and he seemed to be blessed – or cursed – with a boundless curiosity about what lay on the other side of any hill or mountain or river he came across. His curiosity was not limited to geography, however, since he was also interested in what more sedentary men had in their houses or what they might be carrying in their purses. Those twin curiosities, coupled with an almost instinctive realization of when he’d been in one place for quite long enough, kept him continually on the move.
And so it was that he had looked at the prairies of Plakand and Wekti, at the rolling hills of Ansu, and at the mountains of Kagwher, Arum, and Kweron. He had even made occasional sorties into Regwos and southern Nekweros, despite the stories men told of the horrors lurking in the mountains beyond the outer edges of the frontier.
The one thing more than any other that distinguished Althalus from other thieves was his amazing luck. He could win every time he touched a pair of dice, and no matter where he went in whatever land, fortune smiled upon him. A chance meeting or a random conversation almost always led him directly to the most prosperous and least suspicious man in any community, and it seemed that any trail he took, even at random, led him directly to opportunities that came to no other thief. In truth, Althalus was even more famous for his luck than for his wit or his skill.
In time, he came to depend on that luck. Fortune, it appeared, absolutely adored him, and he came to trust her implicitly. He even went so far as to believe privately that she talked to him in the hidden silences of his mind. The little twinge that told him that it was time to leave any given community – in a hurry – was, he believed, her voice giving him a silent warning that unpleasant things lurked on the horizon.
The combination of wit, skill and luck had made him successful, but he could also run like a deer if the situation seemed to require it.
A professional thief must, if he wants to keep eating regularly, spend a great deal of his time in taverns listening to other people talk, since information is the primary essential to the art of the thief. There’s little profit to be made from robbing poor men. Althalus liked a good cup of mellow mead as much as the next man, but he seldom let it get ahead of him in the way that some frequenters of taverns did. A befuddled man makes mistakes, and the thief who makes mistakes usually doesn’t live very long. Althalus was very good at selecting the one man in any tavern who’d be most likely to be in possession of useful information, and with jokes and open-handed generosity, he could usually persuade the fellow to share that information. Buying drinks for talkative men in taverns was something in the nature of a business investment. Althalus always made sure that his own cup ran dry at about the same time the other man’s did, but most of the mead in the thief’s cup ended up on the floor instead of in his belly, for some reason.
He moved from place to place, he told jokes to tavern loafers and bought mead for them for a few days, and then, when he’d pinpointed the rich men in any town or village, he’d stop by to pay them a call along about midnight, and by morning he’d be miles away on the road to some other frontier settlement.
Although Althalus was primarily interested in local information, there were other stories told in taverns as well, stories about the cities down on the plains of Equero, Treborea, and Perquaine, the civilized lands to the south. He listened to some of those stories with a profound skepticism. Nobody in the world could be stupid enough to pave the streets of his home town with gold, and a fountain that sprayed diamonds might be rather pretty, but it wouldn’t really serve any practical purpose.
The stories, however, always stirred his imagination, and he sort of promised himself that someday, someday, he’d have to go down to the cities of the plain to have a look for himself.
The settlements of the frontier were built for the most part of logs, but the cities of the lands of the south were reputed to be built of stone. That in itself might make the journey to civilization worthwhile, but Althalus wasn’t really interested in architecture, so he kept putting off his visit to civilization.
What ultimately changed his mind was a funny story he heard in a tavern in Kagwher about the decline of the Deikan Empire. The central cause of that decline, it appeared, had been a blunder so colossal that Althalus couldn’t believe that anybody with good sense could have even made it once, much less three times.
‘May all of my teeth fall out if they didn’t’, the storyteller assured him. ‘The people down in Deika have a very high opinion of themselves, so when they heard that men had discovered gold here in Kagwher, they decided right off that God had meant for them to have it – only he’d made a mistake and put it in Kagwher instead of down there where it’d be convenient for them to just bend over and pick it up. They were a little put out with God for that, but they were wise enough not to scold him about it. Instead, they sent an army up here into the mountains to keep us ignorant hill-people from just helping ourselves to all that gold that God had intended for them. Well, now, when that army got here and started hearing stories about how much gold there was up here, the soldiers all decided that army life didn’t really suit them any more, so the whole army just ups and quits so that they could strike out on their own.’
Althalus laughed. ‘That would be a quick way to lose an army, I suppose.’
‘There’s none any quicker,’ the humorous story-teller agreed. ‘Anyhow, the Senate that operates the government of Deika was terribly disappointed with that army, so they sent a second army up here to chase down the first one and punish them for ignoring their duty.’
‘You’re not serious!’ Althalus exclaimed.
‘Oh, yes, that’s exactly what they did. Well, sir, that second army decided that they weren’t any stupider than the first one had been, so they hung up their swords and uniforms to go look for gold, too.’
Althalus howled with laughter. ‘That’s the funniest story I’ve ever heard!’ he said.
‘It gets better,’ the grinning man told him. ‘The Senate of the Empire just couldn’t believe that two whole armies could ignore their duty that way. After all, the soldiers were getting paid a whole copper penny every day, weren’t they? The Senators made speeches at each other until all their brains went to sleep, and that’s when they took stupidity out to the very end of its leash by sending a third army up here to find out what had happened to the first two.’
‘Is he serious?’ Althalus asked another tavern patron.
‘That’s more or less the way it happened, stranger,’ the man replied. ‘I can vouch for it, because I was a sergeant in that second army. The city-state of Deika used to rule just about the whole of civilization, but after she’d poured three entire armies into the mountains of Kagwher, she didn’t have enough troops left to patrol her own streets, much less the other civilized lands. Our Senate still passes laws that the other lands are supposed to obey, but nobody pays any attention to them any more. Our Senators can’t quite seem to grasp that, so they keep passing new laws about taxes and the like, and people keep ignoring them. Our glorious Empire has turned itself into a glorious joke.’
‘Maybe I’ve been putting off my visit to civilization for too long,’
